10m – AB4UG Radioblog

CQ WPX (SSB) 2024

I started to play a little bit in the CQ WPX (SSB) contest this past weekend (March 30-31 2024) using the 10m antenna in the attic over the garage. There was a decent amount of activity on the band, mostly from the Caribbean and South America, with a smattering of European stations.

I had logged 6 contacts when I learned that I was making the light on the garage door opener turn on and off.

I’ll have to find some ferrites to put on the wires going into the garage door opener to see if that helps.

Contest: CQWPXSSB
 Band     QSOs     Pts  WPX  Pt/Q
    28       6      16    6   2.7
 Total       6      16    6   2.7
Score: 96
1 Mult = 1.0 Q's

6m/10m attic dipole

Joining the 2m ground plane antenna in the attic now is a 6m/10m fan dipole.

There are too many rafters and roof supports above the ceiling to easily get a longer antenna into the attic, but a 10m dipole is short enough to get up there with some reasonable effort. I decided might as well make it a fan and add 6m to it as well.

Getting the antenna installed in the attic and connected up turned out to be a process that spanned a few weeks, but yesterday I finally got it connected up to the antenna analyzer (RigExpert Stick 230) and got everything trimmed up to about as good as it was going to get.

SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 6m band

6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 6m band — SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 6m band

The SWR is under 3 for most of the 6m band dipping down to just above 2 around 51 MHz. For the 10m band, the SWR is under 2.6 across the band and dipping down to just above 2.2 at about 28.8 MHz.

The radio’s internal antenna tuner seems to handle the antenna pretty well. Now to see if I can make any contacts with it…

Listening to 10m PSK

As an experiment, I left fldigi running listening for PSK signals on 10m (28.120 MHz) for most of the day to see what could be heard. Fldigi can scan the passband and send the callsigns it finds to pskreporter.info, where it gets displayed on a map. Between about 07:30 and 20:30 (EST) today, this is what fldigi spotted through the antenna and radio

A total of 25 stations sending out PSK signals were spotted by fldigi. The European stations were picked up mostly during the day, with South American stations coming in later on in the afternoon and the smattering of stations out west late afternoon/early evening.

Not as much 10m PSK as I thought I’d see. I know there was more PSK activity throughout the day, but either the radio wasn’t hearing them or fldigi wasn’t spotting them. I think I’ll try this a few more days and see how things go.

2013 ARRL 10m contest

Spent a couple hours at the radio playing in the ARRL 10m contest today. Didn’t get to play as much as I wanted to, but managed to score 28 contacts for 1176 points. I’d have played longer, but the cold I managed to catch from somewhere put a damper on things. Managed to snag SD and ND though, both of which seem to be hard to get states. The ND contact is confirmed in LoTW, so hopefully the SD contact will confirm there at the end of the contest. I should be at least a couple states closer to WAS Basic after the weekend.